Digital Engagement, Salesforce, and Boosting Productivity with DAPs

Digital engagement, Salesforce, and DAPs go hand-in-hand – as we’ll see in this article, using DAPs to train sales staff is a sure way to improve engagement, productivity, and performance.

Before we explain how, though, let’s briefly explain what a DAP is.

DAP is short for Digital Adoption Platform.

These platforms are software adoption tools that help businesses with:

• Employee training
• Product onboarding
• Product adoption and digital adoption

They are built around several key features that can greatly enhance engagement and improve the user experience.

Those features include:

• Contextualized guidance. Interactive assistance is provided directly inside the app. Users can learn exactly what they need to know … exactly when they need to know it. This improves knowledge retention and decreases productivity downtime.
• In-app walkthroughs. Step-by-step walkthroughs help users learn workflows quickly and easily, without human trainers. This increases the pace of learning, keeps users productive, and reduces the need for individual research.
• Software analytics. Software analytics offer deep insight into how employees use their software. The result: trainers can pinpoint stumbling blocks, reduce error rates, and implement corrective action as needed.

Certain platforms, such as WalkMe, include modules specifically dedicated to Salesforce.

Using WalkMe’s DAP for Salesforce or Salesforce Lightning is an ideal way to streamline training and adoption for this well-known CRM platform.

However, this point brings up an interesting question and an important point.

What is the difference between training and adoption?

A Key Difference: Salesforce Training vs. Salesforce Adoption

Employee training tends to focus on skills, tools, and abilities.

Adoption, however, includes training, but it also expands its scope to include:

• Employee productivity, workforce performance, and organizational performance. Training efforts that focus only on employee skills can become too short-sighted. It is easy to lose track of the real aim behind training efforts: organizational performance gains. For that reason, it is best to use a digital adoption strategy and framework.
• Streamlining the digital workplace and integrating digital workflows. The digital workplace is continually evolving. To keep up, employees must continually reskill and upskill. Training programs, therefore, must be adaptable and stay focused on making the digital workplace as efficient as possible.
• Improving the adoption experience. Onboarding, training, and adoption are all part of the employee experience. Improving that experience will improve engagement, decrease frustration, and help organizations get better results from their Salesforce training efforts.

Experienced digital training managers know full well that their training efforts inevitably end up including points such as these.

There are several reasons why:

• Organizational performance depends on having a workforce that is digitally skilled and productive
• To be productive in today’s digital work environment, employees must be proficient in multiple tools
• Employee engagement, performance, and productivity depend a great deal on their digital experience

In short, trainers must go several steps beyond “teaching software skills.”

They must focus on the bigger picture: fully adopting and integrating Salesforce into the workplace.

Challenges to Salesforce Training and Adoption

There are several challenges that can hinder enterprise software training efforts:

• Complexity – SaaS platforms such as Salesforce come with steep learning curves. In order to become productive, employees must spend a certain amount of time just learning the software. 
• Time – That learning curve means that enterprises must fund employee training efforts, even if they are not yet productive members of the workforce. 
• Budgets – As a workforce increases in size, so too does its training needs. A natural consequence of this is an increase in training needs, complexity, and budget sizes.
• Scalability – Not all training can be scaled efficiently. Human-led training efforts, either in person or online, cannot be scaled cost-effectively, for example.

Overcoming these challenges is critical for any training program to be effective.

Fortunately for organizations that implement Salesforce, DAPs are designed to overcome these challenges.

Digital Engagement, Salesforce, and Digital Adoption Platforms

As mentioned earlier, DAPs are platforms that offer in-app guidance, context-based training, interactive product tours, and in-product walkthroughs.

They are built specifically for businesses that want to maximize the efficiency of their software adoption efforts.

Why Use DAPs Over Other Training Solutions?

There are several advantages that DAPs offer over other training approaches:

• Higher digital engagement. As we have seen, DAPs deliver training that is in-product, interactive, and immediate. This immediacy helps keep users engaged, which dramatically boosts their learning potential and the outcomes of training efforts.
• Productivity from day one. When users can be walked step-by-step through a series of tasks, then they can begin performing that task immediately. This is especially important for Salesforce, which can be daunting for new users.
• Accelerated productivity and training time. DAPs decrease time-to-competency, helping organizations realize the value of their software more quickly.
• Scalability. Scale matters little for organizations that use DAPs. The underlying infrastructure and the administrative efforts remain the same – and, more importantly, the user experience and the results remain the same.

Regardless of the organization’s needs or size, a DAP can change the game when it comes to training workers and improving employee productivity.

To learn more about DAPs, check out some of other guides on our digital adoption blog.